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Applied Naturalism

How might adopting worldview naturalism affect us? This section discusses how naturalism applies to our personal lives and many other areas, including criminal justice, social justice, social policy, and behavioral health. See the links to the left for major topic areas.

Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism: How to Survive the Culture Wars - The root conflict in the culture wars is between two drastically different ways of understanding reality, one empirical, the other not. The liberal-democratic political solution to such conflict is to provide a neutral public space within which differing worldviews make their case. But the very existence of such space and our pluralist society is threatened by totalitarian ambitions for ideological conformity. This threat is best countered by promoting empiricism, not faith, as the basis for knowledge.

Avoiding Collapse: Determinism, Altruism, and the Creation of Political Will - Despite discomfort with the idea of determinism, there's no way to rationally understand the world unless we suppose stable, law-like cause-effect relations hold at the macro-level. Seeing that political will is a causal product of conditions, not magically bootstrapped into existence, may increase our effectiveness in creating support for environmental sustainability.

Naturalistic Lexicon of Responsibility - This defines common terms related to responsibility, morality and free will without appealing to the notion that a person could have done otherwise given the governing conditions, both inside and outside the body.